You said meet me at a motel room by the airport. You said it should be cheap. Carpet worn thin as your hair and my smile, walls stained a pattern like defunct Martha Stewart, crafty intelligence plastered over with decoys. I walked to the ice machine and saw a trucker, belt that should be demoted for jeans too low under a belly awning. He wanted to talk about the motorcycle trip he took from Key West to Miami back when his belt was top-notch job performance. Yawning, I wanted to reach my arm in the ice machine and freeze it off, slap it on his face till it fractured, shattered on the ground, and the maid mistook it for spilt ice. I

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost,

something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.

â€”Mary Oliver

We are an army of poets

with holes in our socks

and sorrow in our hearts

and we will take you on

and we will match you

and like samurai use syllables

to slice through deception;

the volume of our outcry

will be like bagpipes

on the clifftops,

keening for the fallen

and reminding the standing

of the meaning of fortitude;

and we will march forth

emerging from solitude

bearing banners and pennants

and we will not be daunted

by sly stratagems or guns;

we will not cower or cover

our words with our hands

but proclaim them with courage

and hear each other out

and have each otherâ€™s backs

and persevere in the darkness

lighting our way with our words.

Carson Pynes

Diet Coke

For Ruth

She wakes,

too early each morning.

Drinks a cloud of cigarette

smoke,

a silver-lined

can of Coke.

No sugar,

just Aspartame,

the chemical name

of withdrawal,

headache,

craving.

Her once-blonde hair

is spiked gunmetal,

An ex-Marine-

turned-schoolteacher

with solder in her voice,

her mani-pedi,

her Oklahoma manners,

cursing

battery-acid blue

over imperfect

pancakes.

Iâ€™m awake,

too early

on a Saturday

hungover,

headache,

craving.

Sheâ€™s lost one

breast to cancer,

an Amazon,

my best friendâ€™s mother

is the sunrise

at the end of the world.

Honey, she says,

when life hands you lemons,

you paint that shit gold.

I Was a Teenage Mean Girl

For L, and for who we used to be

I donâ€™t need your malicious charity,

a vile and multipurpose contraption

fake like the holographic portrait of Jesus Christ

for sale at a kiosk in the mall where we meet boys.

Itâ€™s hard to forget your face,

Sloppy, bland, (I fix your mascara)

violent and slick as you call me â€œwhoreâ€

a banshee screaming at a Halloween house party.

You: a bare-midriff baseball player,

me in booty shorts and butterfly wings.

How could I forget our years spent

living in, like, the high-school language ghetto?

The empty bottles of Bombay Sapphire,

your fake fingernails endlessly flashing like

witch-lights in the desert.

Then there was lunch at the Wildflower Cafe,

salmon caesar salad with capers and a lavender-peach smoothie,

while outside it was snowing and you offered me a cigarette

from a crumpled pack of 27â€™s. I inhaled,

and thought about the rhythm and blues of malfunctioning lungs.

Moonlighting

For Mom

When I was very small

you took me outside, at night,

to photograph the moon.

I wore duct-tape shoes,

you carried a tripod.

I have never told you this,

but with your lens pointed to the sky,

I thought you were taking a self-portrait.

I still believe that.

Bucky Ignatius

Rear View

Dandridge Drive-Thru Beverage

is gone, love child of a general

store and covered bridge,

choked by convenience

chains, economy of scale:

gone, soon forgotten.

No more crony clubhouse

for jokers and smokers

to pass hot nights staring

into the slow parade,

grading the trade, hoping

to catch some thigh.

A species born endangered,

vanishing breed thinner

by one. Its skeleton stands

time-worn, forlorn, most

of the parts still good

for somethingâ€”maybe

a museum on the outskirts

of town, oil drum around

back for pitched empties

and spit, neon sign starting

to stutter, hot rod dreams

up on blocks somewhere.

Sonnet with Reptiles

Before the Chianti

is opened, before

the pesto is ground,

Iâ€™m already high

on basil oiled fingers,

gush of tomato

juice on my chin,

dazzled by darting

Lazarus lizards,

captured and brought

to Ohio from Italy,

who rule the rocks

in my garden, their own

Mediterranean dream.

Hide and Seek

My kitchen is a clutter of purloined

letters hiding in plain sight. Odd

shaped thingsâ€”Cuisinart blade,

French press plungerâ€”come to mind,

but not to hand without a search.

Eyes methodically scan the surfaces:

counter, three sinks, two tables,

the dishrack. Repeat. Add the floor,

look behind and under, more slowly,

with a curse this time. That vegetable

knife is too large, too brown to hide

in familiar stacks and scatters of glass

and silver where every meal starts

with a prayer to Saint Anthony.

â€œSomething Old, . . .â€

A gentle joke mingled

at my second wedding,

â€œTheyâ€™re registered at Seven Hills Resale.â€

True enough, things I like best

have often been discarded

in the common market.

Home-made, well worn

things, not wallflowers,

participants in the fray.

Companions for hand and eye,

things someone might find

worth trying to mend.

End of September

for Carl Sagan

waning fire down

to quivering lumps

of light, furnace

orange and charcoal

one triangle tongue

of flame in the corner

of the bed flickers out

comfort, warmth, wisps

of smoke, brush of hair

from the crown

of a loverâ€™s head

these things and more,

everything emanating

from ashes of dead stars

Violet Mitchell

No One Lives at 1962 McCollum Road

wraparound

porch ties up the

stench of smoke

and 8x10s of me

and my brother

and cousin Kevin,

one from every

year but now

upstairsâ€”

a ghost smoking Marlboros

next to the lady who

rented the top floor,

gone since August

and fled the Ohio farmhouseâ€”

brought some whiskey to

the attic washed-out lemon

partyâ€”sour but realâ€”

for Grandfather Rustyâ€™s strict mother:

sworn Catholic, first

owner of the house,

rudely sat on his lighter

forgetting things could still

be solidâ€”

doorknob spins, Kevin

crashes with

extra meds in hand

Rusty tells his life story

ends different

every time I ask

Deleting Emails the Week After Kevin Died

Sympathy note from a distant

great uncle who plays bass:

Know that I am thinking about you

and playing as much music as I can

for you right now. I can hear his

strings stretch and swirl in notes

I donâ€™t know how to read. In his

hands, thereâ€™s a blueberry smoothie

with lavender foam the same shade

as my hair. The straw is too small,

but heâ€™s trying hard to balance his

breath with the ground-up plants.

I wish I could draw on the bricks

of my building the way he can play.

I could remember the sound of just,

and forget the piercings in the crux.

[worked hard]

Remington

I sit with my inherited

typewriter under rainbow

strung lights framing a frost-bitten

window. My fingernails chip

and rip when they catch

between the dusty keys.

The number 1 is missing

and at first I thought I broke it

but then I learned old Remingtons

donâ€™t have 1s, so people

just used a lowercase â€œLâ€

instead. The stains on my fingers

from the ribbon smudge everything

I touch and I wonder if like

Midas I can turn the cat into

ink. The jags in the ribbon

older than my mother remind me

of teeth: baby teeth riding

the subway, yellowing teeth

hooked in my clenched jaw,

a baby tooth I found in a creaky

chest from McCollum Road that

I flung away because who

even knows whose it was.

A Wednesday I Canâ€™t Remember

â€œThe heart lies to itself because it must.â€ â€”Jack Gilbert

The sale

sticker on

the shampoo bottle is crinkled from

water-dry-water-dry and

reminds me of a sun if it had

a big

â€œ1.99â€

painted on it. The last of bacon

is a puddle of grease

and unhealthy burnt fat bits swimming

in the

American

Dream. At work, a ghost scrap of lint has its

toes trapped in the black frame

of the window. It shakes in the breeze,

forcib-

ly dancing.

Some sort of machine hiding in the

walls regulates the air

and washes the silence over with

an on-

going wave

that we filter into as silence.

When I looked down at my therapistâ€™s

shoes, trying to avoid

her eyes

as mine dripped,

I said we have the same water bottle.

Thereâ€™s glitter on the floor

from a dollar-store hat that

shed its

skin once the

cake was all gone. Dark brown lipstick on

a girlâ€™s lips are perfect

until she opens her mouth, when you

can see

where the pen-

cil ends and her skin that hardly spends any time in the

light begins. A dryer

sheet fell out of my clean

clothes, and

a tangled

grayed silver USB cord is there

with a thin black sock that isnâ€™t mine.

Sam Collier

Sanctuary for the Chosen Lost

We buried our fingers in fleece

until our skin shone.

Lanolin. Warm sheep faces

rubbing our shins. Dirt

packed so hard only hard rain

could ease it. Jacketed,

we closed our throats, scattered

geese, penned sly-eyed goats

gave blind ponies, broken ducks,

a feast of sun. In gravel dawns

we soaked our shoes in grass

and shoveled shit. The sky opened us

with its blade of wind.

Your body a ladder of light. Mine

a pillar of salt. Dozens

of birds between us, their chests

too swollen for their hearts

to fill. One time a pig fell over,

couldnâ€™t get up. Bad hip.

Huge. We strained to lift him,

a sling around his belly, his eyes rolling,

his bristle-bare skin so human

I looked away. Strange

intimates. He shuddered, shrieked:

indignity of the treacherous body. I

saw. I saw. Sometimes my hands

betrayed me. Sometimes I sang

then thinking, caught myself,

covered it, turning my mouth

to the open mouth of the fan,

generous gale of its silence.

Nocturne In An Empty Sea

In 2007 a bowhead whale was caught off the coast of Alaska with fragments of a harpoon in its shoulder bone. The harpoon dated back to the late 1800s, indicating that the whale was at least 115 years old.

Salt in your mouth and your eyes clouds, you scrape crustaceans

and drift through winters, calling to the secret wells of water

in vowels shaped for love. There were years

when no one came. There were long years

when you thought you might be last. Might be final.

But sometimes from the liquid deep, a beautiful dark shape,

and then sometimes a calf, pressed shining

to the surface, swelled fat on milk and strong enough

to leave you. Nothing lasts. The world is warming and that old ache

still grumbles at your backâ€”a spear carved in a lost century,

so men could read of plagues and angels by the blaze

of your lit fat, or split and steam your bristled teeth

to bind their daughtersâ€™ ribs. They struck you, but you sank away,

blood darkening the sea. You healed. Youâ€™ve carried the iron

hooked in your bone for so long now itâ€™s part of you,

driving you on. You have no word for loneliness. You have no words

for summer. Yours is the kingdom of ice and wind. You swim

and the world spills before you into songs of blue and grey,

you crack the ice and the air is a rush of sweet cold, you breathe

and midnight comes again with its purple dust of stars.

Meryl Natchez

Equivocal Activist

Itâ€™s Friday. We pull out of the Paris climate accord

and I get my hair cut while Aretha bridges

troubled water. I could lay me down,

but I doubt that would accomplish anything.

Would anything accomplish anything?

Still, Iâ€™m uncomfortable doing nothing,

an equivocal activist, pretty sure

I canâ€™t count on my teammates,

jumpy as a handful of BBs

dropped on stone.

I can see how restful it would be

to believe in the simple solution.

Instead, heavy-footed,

I tread the Earth, while the sun rises

and sets without comment,

and the chickens, remorseless,

search out any protein around,

even if itâ€™s the last Doloff cave spider,

as dragonflies ricochet above us

endlessly stitching

the tattered sky

and I do what passes for the best I can.

Beginning of an incomplete list

Worry prevents harm. You have to worry x7 minutes to prevent each bad thing from happening.

Thinking it will happen will jinx it. Thinking it wonâ€™t happen will make it happen. If you tell another person it will happen, it definitely wonâ€™t happen.

If you tell someone how much money you have, you will lose it all immediately.

You canâ€™t play the car radio when youâ€™re driving around looking for your lost kid.

If the sticky, erratic key turns easily, youâ€™re going to have a good day.

If you change the sheets, you get well faster.

If you have two flashlights, youâ€™ll have them forever. If you have one, it will lost constantly. (This also applies to scissors.)

Cancellation of insurance causes disaster specific to your policy.

Yelling makes the cake fall.

Itâ€™s lucky to see a snake.

There is a complicated and ever changing set of items you shouldnâ€™t eat. Eating them causes cancer to start growing in your body. This can be stopped by not eating them.

Breast examination causes lumps.

Itâ€™s a sin to eat super expensive food in a restaurant.

You have to change your earrings after something bad happens.

Right thinking makes seeds grow. Seeds know what right thinking is.

Seeing a beautiful bird is a good omen.

Visual contact with loved ones prevents harm.

The earthquake will happen when your loved ones are on the other side of the bridge.

You have to wash new clothes before you wear them.

If someoneâ€™s dog rejects you itâ€™s because you are a fundamentally bad person.

Leaving home is fraught with insurmountable obstacles.

If God exists, he is not a woman.

Cheese Ball

Whole factories are dedicated to this,

pillars of cheddar large enough

to bear a second story, and wire

that cuts the slabs. Machines

add the precise measure of port wine,

according to Michele Bean, Cheese Ball Expert.

The process takes a long time.

Great steel vats churn and burble,

a conveyer trundles nuts, paddles

spin the balls along till not a scintilla of cheese shows,

all glossed with nutty skin. This must

be a metaphor for something: children

moving through the school system,

or what happens when primitive tribes

encounter matches and carbon steel.

Maybe weâ€™re all just cheese balls,

starting from something simple, like milk,

pummeled and slashed

and adulterated and finally extruded

in a shape of use to someone

with a sense of humor

and an insatiable appetite.

Sleepwalking

Each night sleep asserts its mysterious imperative

as the mind ceases to brace itself

against its own undoing, against what lurks in the back

of the dark, the bad luck

and cryptic privilege

of human being: water protein marrow fat, those

convolutes of DNA that say

bleary blue bright brown iris

say barrel legs willow stalks, hair that never grays

or drifts off, the dickey or unflappable heart,

the canny fingers and tricky intelligence

I rely on

because what else have I got?

And even though it doesnâ€™t feel like I am merely plasma

in a permeable membrane interacting with air and water

and prejudice and language into which mist

I find myself plunked,

occasionally I glimpse

that itâ€™s true, everything fluid,

everything affecting everything else

so that the racist rants of the attacker in Portland

infuse a gritty particulate into the common air,

cold bone fragments make it hard to breathe,

many small knives press against the very flesh of my very neck,

and everywhere clamor, the scrabble for or against

and I am smack in the middle of it:

rage, righteousness, acts later analyzed and repudiated,

but here and now

before sleep comes to claim me

with its car wrecks and crumbling teeth, I acknowledge

that I understand nothing,

not on any team

and on every team at once, connected,

for better and worse

to everything.

William Godbey

Manuscript

Our last great American novel has been broken

across thousands of ragged pieces of cardboard.

Scribbled on by invisible men and women

with no welcome mats, surrounded by the red glare

of neon liquor storefronts and styrofoam cup wallets.

These black marker fragments of spent time,

ripped from moving boxes and orange crates,

blow across hazy bus stops and concrete islands.

They litter beneath our smoldering purple mountains.

Phrases, pleas, prayers slouch unread by the people

white-knuckling their steering wheels

with doors locked and windows sealed, frightened

to make eye contact with anything but the broad stripes

of yellow on the spacious highways.

Rescuing these signs,

your arms full, almost bursting,

is too brave for a young heart freshly strung

on the flagpole. Theyâ€™ll only become heavier

the more you lift.

Let them rest, decay.

Turn the key to your engine.

Roll over this vulnerable kindling,

the way wildfire is blind to poppies.

hide & seek

I found my voice in the bottom of a Scottish well.

Grunting the wooden cover ajar, I peered

through the gooey darkness that was muffling him.

He was draped in gray moss & crumbling poker chips,

shaking how a mouse in my palm would after a moonless night

spent in a catâ€™s alley.

No sunlight had turned his skin seashell white,

a stern look or warm gaze wouldâ€™ve cracked him open

& loosed the stench of a rotting jack-oâ€™-lantern.

I spotted his toes, curling black from the soggy cold

that was sucking the teaspoons of air

out of his raisin lungs.

He squinted up at me with navy red eyes, his fear a barb

into the liferaft I had scribbled his name on years ago

& kept chained to my daydreams.

His arms were constellations of pinprick bruises

contouring towards nails scraped raw from desperation

to scale this drainpipe of bricks, away from this quiet prison.

My voice opened & closed his mouth, his dissolving tongue

unable to pick the words between his crowded teeth

that wouldnâ€™t melt from a whisperâ€™s heat.

The goosebumps that rippled around my chest

as I had imagined our reunion, were now caught in my throat.

We stared into each other, love & repulsion thickening

into a yellow cough syrup that time refused to swallow.

The sound of a crow pierced the distance, shattering

the pink Scotland dawn around my hesitation.

I grabbed the cover & yanked

it back across the wellâ€™s grim opening.

My voiceâ€™s O of betrayal rang louder than his silence,

but I had been searching for too long, the well was deep

& it was my turn to hide.

A Corn Field in Los Angeles

I strung up my skeleton

on the front lawn sycamore,

the trunk dangling rotten bark.

my neighbors asked me what itâ€™s for

itâ€™s my scarecrow for the dark.

when night streaks across the 605,

his wings smother the horizon

strafing Eichlers with midnight napalm,

and while you quiver under your bed sheets

my skeleton jangles and sways,

but will not snap.

just how lambâ€™s blood dries, evening

passes over my skeleton

but will crash through your houses,

your bones, pecking at what eats away at you.

a lunar spotlight on whatever insecurities

you squeeze beneath your mattress,

as he drags the husk thatâ€™s left of you

out with the stalks of sunrise.

my neighbors gape as I hobble back inside

to slump on my kitchen floor, wait

to welcome my old friend,

with a bottle of gin wrapped in a brown bag,

spineless and safe.

Don Hogle

Austin Wallson Confesses

I had a Known Traveler Number with TSA Pre-Check from the Department of Homeland Security. Iâ€™d received the Latin Award in junior high school. Certainly, I was up to the task.

My mentor was a scion of the Scranton Lace Company. He advised I wear a hand-tied wig to disguise myself. We chose a holiday when the staff flew kites in the park and the Marsh of Epidemics was uncharacteristically illness-free.

Once inside the reception hall, I located the Fragonard that hid the safe where the Compendium was kept. The adjoining rooms were filled with enamelware, mostly from the Middle Ages.

As I began to spin the tumblers, I noticed the tessellated floor had been mathematically tiled by a pattern-burring machine. It could mean only one thing: metaphorically, the music was about to stop, and I was without a chair.

Qui gladio ferit, gladio perit. I sat cross-legged on a tufted velvet settee and reviewed my Miranda rights, as lasers striated the gallery and alarms began to shriek.

Her people are the Charbonneaus, and that black line has left its mark on her beautyâ€”she has the mouth of a monkfish. His father was the monarch of a principality absorbed into Nice, and he is now, more or less, the king of all those nice NiÃ§ois.

I rarely have them over; theyâ€™re too volatile for bridge, and they frighten the dogs. May I offer you another digestif?

Death Comes with Luggage

When Death arrived at the door, it was not as a hooded figure shrouded in black, but rather a dark, shapeless mass with hands. The hands clutched the retractable handle of a large black suitcase, the kind too many people check on overseas flights.

All she said wasâ€”Time to go. Previously, on similar occasions, Iâ€™d tried to cry out but could produce only a faint rasping sound. This time, I yelled as loudly as I couldâ€”No! No!

I woke, certain Iâ€™d actually shouted. But no one came running to my room to see if I were all right. The old house remained silent, and beyond the bedroom window, the darkness was all around us.

Contributor Notes

Laura Apol teaches creative writing and literature at Michigan State University. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and she is the author of several award-winning collections of her own poems: Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun; Requiem, Rwanda; Celestial Bodies; With a Gift for Burning (forthcoming); and Nothing but the Blood (forthcoming).

Sarah Blanchard has recently returned to writing poetry and short fiction after spending several decades as a business teacher, corporate marketer, non-fiction writer, and facility manager for an astronomical observatory in Hawaiâ€™i. Several of her early poems were published in Calyx, Welter, Conscience, The Planetary Report, and The Red Fox Review. She currently works as a real estate agent and lives in Raleigh, NC, with her husband, three horses, three dogs and several chickens.

lauren a. boisvert is a poet and a pisces from Florida. Her work has been published in Spy Kids Review, Mochila Review, Coffin Corner, and elsewhere. She tweets @myldstallyns.

Sam Collier is a poet, playwright, and theater artist. Her poems have been published in Iron Horse, Mortar Magazine, The Puritan, Liminal Stories, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her plays have been developed and/or produced by the Chicago Theatre Marathon, PTP/NYC, New Ground Theater, and Theater Nyx. Sam holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and is a 2017-18 member of the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit. She teaches with the National Writers Series of Traverse City.

Doni Faber enjoys libraries, singing in a band, and emergent homeschooling. She is a retired slam poet, boothie, and third grade teacher. She has written a biography of her grandpa who dedicated his life to making people laugh. This is her first publication. You can find her book reviews at foldedpages distillery.com

William Godbeyâ€™s work has appeared in several publications, including the Chiron Review, Misfit Magazine, and Slipstream Press. He is currently pursuing a BA in English from California State University Long Beach, where he currently lives. He is 22 years old.

ZoÃ« Harrison, a twenty-year-old Montanan who has only seen a Broad-leaved forest once and found it quite too short. Though she would go back in a second if it meant escaping the gray slush of a February rain.

Don Hogle was the winner of the 2016 Haydenâ€™s Ferry Review poetry contest as selected by Alberto Rios among other awards. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Hartskill Review, The Inquisitive Eater (The New School), Jenny (Youngstown State University), Stone Canoe, South Florida Poetry Journal, Pocket Change and Shooter and A3 Review in the U.K. among others. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com

Bucky Ignatius is a semi-reformed hippie who has spent most of his 70-plus years in or near Cincinnati, where he now tends a large eccentric garden and a small comically curious cat. A chapbook of fifty short poems, Fifty Under Fifty was published by Finishing Line Press in 2015. For meager wages and inspiration, he operates a century-old elevator in a former factory that now houses more than a hundred working artists.